Products Liability

When a person suffers injury as a result of contact
with a specific product, the legal issues raised can be
complex. If the product was defective in design,
manufacture, or labeling, or there was a failure to warn
of some risk, the injured person may have grounds for a
legal claim against the manufacturer or seller. However,
if the injured person's misuse of the product was at
least a partial cause of the injury, in North Carolina
the manufacturer and seller are generally not liable. In
addition to case law developed by the North Carolina
appellate courts over decades, products liability claims
and defenses to such claims are governed by the North
Carolina Product Liability Act.

Whether you have suffered harm from a defective
product, or you are the manufacturer or seller of a
product, you have legal options – but you need the
assistance of an experienced products liability attorney
to protect your rights. The Pinto Coates Kyre & Bowers
firm has filed claims on behalf of injured persons and
has defended companies in a large number of products
liability lawsuits. Because we have handled both sides
of these issues, we are familiar with many of the
challenges you will face in a products liability claim,
and we recognize which issues are most likely to affect
the outcome of your case. We consult with necessary
experts to help with factual issues, such as causation
and whether a product was defective, and we use our
extensive understanding of the applicable laws to build
a case for each client.

Our attorneys have the experience and knowledge
necessary to either represent individuals who believe
they have been harmed by a product or to defend a
company who has manufactured or sold a product that
allegedly caused an injury.

Attorneys Who Usually Handle Matters in the Products Liability Practice Area:

Recent Posts From Our Blog

Legal Decisions of Interest

A recent opinion out of the Texas Supreme Court has recently been the subject of a lot of commentary around the insurance coverage and construction world. The case is Ewing Construction Co. v. Amerisure Insurance Co., and it came before the Texas Supreme Court on certification of questions from the Fifth Circuit (Ewing Constr. Co. […]In cases involving construction defect claims (and potentially other types of claims), the insurance policy that is implicated is a very important issue. The issue of whose policy and/or which policy is “on the risk” for a particular claim is most often referred to as “trigger of coverage”. Some states’ laws allow all policies in […]

In connection with a discovery dispute between the parties, the Court of Appeals held that a blanket general objection asserted by the defendants based on “the attorney/client privilege, the work product doctrine, or any other applicable privilege or doctrine” was inadequate to effect the intended purpose of the objection. The Court noted that even though […]In a lawsuit involving a mobile home park tenant assaulted by another tenant, the Court of Appeals stated that although North Carolina law has recognized a landowner’s duty to exercise reasonable care to protect tenants from foreseeable third-party criminal acts, such a duty did not include a duty to evict a tenant, and although other […]

In a medical malpractice lawsuit brought by the parents of a deceased child alleging that defendant doctors were negligent in failing to discover lacerations to the child’s liver at the hospital following a car accident, the Court of Appeals agreed that the parents’ expert witness’ testimony was not improperly speculative, even though the expert used […]The North Carolina Supreme Court “adopted” the reasoning of the dissenting Court of Appeals judge and hence held that the age of a lawful visitor injured on property naturally occurring (a creek), in and of itself, did not impose a higher standard of care on the property owner, because such a heightened level of care […]

In a product liability action involving a self-propelled wheelchair that caught fire, resulting in the house to catch on fire and burning Plaintiff’s decedent, the Court of Appeals held that the defense of “insulating negligence” (by which a defendant is insulated from liability by an independent act of another) does not apply where it is […]The Court of Appeals, asserting that it was following established law, declined to allow damages for the loss of a pet dog based upon a strong emotional bond the owners had with the dog, and instead damages were generally limited to the cost of “replacing” the dog, since the Court viewed the dog as merely […]

Although Plaintiff filed the Complaint without it being signed and ordinarily that would result in the action being deemed not to have been properly instituted, Plaintiff’s prompt remedial measures of filing an amended, signed Complaint corrected the deficiency, and the amended Complaint related back to the commencement of the action for purposes of timeliness. Estate […]